Kotei Preparations

With a scant 5 days before Malaysia’s Kotei, everyone is frantic deck testing, tweaking, rebuilding entirely new decks, etc. But if you have little to no time to spend on a live play test, there’s still hope. This only works at least 3 days before the event. Make every second worth it.

1) Fishbowl. Play with yourself. Get used to your deck and try to get the timing of when to play your cards/activating abilities down. The more you know your deck and how to prepare for contingencies, the less panic you’ll face. This will take an entire day.

2) Bring a notebook when you CAN play with other people. With only a spare couple of days, you have a very limited amount of time to play and get your game on. So do take note what works and what doesn’t when you play test this close to the competition. Bring a notebook. Write down what other people are packing and what you can do/change to plug the holes in your deck. But I suppose the pre-requisite to this rule is to play test with different types of decks. Mainly: honour, dishonour, military cavalry, military naval. It’s very broad, but fighting those types will give you an idea what your local meta is packing.

3) On the same night you played with other people, modify your deck, follow your notes and fishbowl some more. Your second day is done. Push and burn yourself. You need to complete your deck that very night.

4) On your last day, pack your deck, resleeve it with fresh sleeves, put a nice box and prepare your counters. Don’t play. Let your brain relax and do other stuff like getting your costume sorted out or something. Sleep early that night. The last thing you need is to be mentally burned out at the first round of the competition.

I realised this is really cutting it, but sometimes, you don’t have the luxury that other people have and you just have to make do. Another way is to sneak in some online play time, but that can’t be done in 3 days. It’s more of sneaking in during your regular busy days.

I just completely chuck my dueling deck and re-did the basic starter Crane deck for Kotei. The starter deck is generally okay-ish, but it runs on multiple directions at once. So I just chose 1 direction, stripped the deck bare and patched it up again. Hopefully this gambit pays off. It’s generally stable so far but it’s very rudimentary, void of all the fancy staples that I should be running. Oh well.